Adam: Hi, I’m Adam
Nitzan: and I’m Nitzan...
Adam: ...and this is Stories From The Eastern West, telling you little-known stories from Central and Eastern Europe that changed our world.
Nitzan: Today, we’re back for season 4. Over the next ten months, we’ll be dropping a story each month that’ll bring our part of the world closer to home!
Adam: We begin with the story of a man with an impressive CV. He used to predict the future and write best-selling books. He also learned English in a week from a dictionary, hosted business meetings on rollercoasters, and had massive disputes with artists such as Andrej Tarkovsky and Phillip K. Dick.
Nitzan: We’re talking about Stanisław Lem, the science-fiction writer whose works, abilities and quirky sense of humor convinced Phillip K. Dick that he was too brilliant to exist and must have actually been a committee of people!
Adam: Lem the man however did exist and despite living behind the Iron Curtain he foresaw the Internet, smartphones and ebooks as early as the 1950s and 1960s, and he wrote a tonne of worthwhile literature along the way.
Nitzan: How was that even possible? Stay with us and get to know your next favorite writer - Stanisław Lem.
Adam: Coming up, on Stories From The Eastern West!
Nitzan: When it comes to Lem’s early days and roots, the author produced a lot to read about them. He wrote an autobiographical novel called High Castle, and also gave two extended interviews where he seemingly explained every single detail of his life.
Adam: Lem said he came from a typical catholic Polish family from Lviv, a city that was part of Poland before World War II. But for literature professor Agnieszka Gajewska, something felt off. She decided to travel to Lviv herself and follow in Lem’s footsteps to make sure that his personal story wasn’t just another leap of his imagination.
Agnieszka Gajewska: So I went to Lviv, I got a grant so I could spend more than a month there. And to be honest, the whole stay was almost entirely futile. I couldn’t find anything and now I know that it was because the road map I was using were his extended interviews and the novel ‘High Castle’ - works widely recognized as autobiographical...
Nitzan: Confused, Gajewska asked local academic Nadiya Polishchuk for help.
Agnieszka Gajewska: I wasn’t allowed to access some documents or at least it’d be extremely expensive for a foreigner, so she really helped me a lot. What we were looking for was Lem’s baptism certificate. And we couldn’t find it! We visited every church we could. I remember how we wer r e sitting in the courtyard of the Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church and were wondering where to go next, is there a church we overlooked? And then Nadia went to an archive where she found documents about the Jewish community and there, she found Lem’s father's name - Samuel Lem, who it turns out, had donated generously to the community. That was a real breakthrough moment. I realised that the documents we were looking for weren’t lost but rather, they were somewhere else, not where I expected having read High Castle and the two interviews.
Adam: That’s how Gajewska realised that Stanisław Lem, one of the most popular sci-fi authors in Europe, had been concealing his Jewish roots his entire life! Suddenly, everything fell into place.
Agnieszka Gajewska: All of a sudden, it transpired that High Castle was an autobiography, but a deeply coded one. It tells the true story if you know how to read it.
Nitzan: It confirmed the vague suspicions Gajewska had had earlier whenever she’d found certain random scenes in Lem’s books. For example, in his novel His Master’s Voice, there’s a scene where some Nazis are getting ready to execute a group of Jews...
Agnieszka Gajewska: In that scene, Saul Rappaport, the main protagonist, is trying to stop himself from bursting into laughter when one of the Jews tries to convince his German executor, in Yiddish, that he’s not Jewish...
Adam: When Saul and the other Jews are about to be killed, the execution is suddenly stopped because of a visit from a German film crew which, obviously, don’t want to film Nazi soldiers perpetrating war crimes. Saul miraculously survives.
Agnieszka Gajewska: But this whole fragment comes so out of the blue, it almost doesn’t belong in the novel. It’s as if it was a different story, and I later learned it can be reconstructed historically as the Lviv pogrom…
Nitzan: Now aware that Lem was Jewish, Gajewska immediately realised that he must have lived through the Lviv Pogroms during the summer of 1941. These terrible war crimes were perpetrated by a mix of Ukrainian nationalists, German death squads and local crowds against the inmates of three prisons who were mostly Jewish. Young civilian Jews, including the 19-year-old Stanisław Lem, were forced to clear away the dead bodies after one of these pogroms...
Agnieszka Gajewska: And when they had dragged all the bodies and body parts into the prison yard, the German soldiers started executing these Jewish helpers, the ones who’d had to clear the bodies out of the prison cells. But then suddenly, a film crew arrived and the shooting stopped. Those who were still in the queue, awaiting their execution, were suddenly set free and they went back home...
Adam: Lem and his closest family miraculously survived the war. Once it was over, they immediately moved to Kraków. Lem however never rejoined the Jewish community and, as Gajewska claims, he had three good reasons.
Agnieszka Gajewska: It was a very important decision but also one typical for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in the 1940s. Many found that they had been displaced and had to move to places on the new map of Poland. They were cut off from their Jewish communities, and at the same time hearing about pogroms in Kielce, in Kraków…
But, on the other hand, it could have been a question of identity. People like Lem wanted a fresh start, to shrug off the labels that had led to the annihilation of thousands of Jews in Lviv. They no longer wanted to live within these categories.
Finally, the new communist system wasn’t favorable to religious communities. Most of the deeply religious Jews who were looking for comfort in religious practices just emigrated. They didn’t want to be afraid that secret services were spying on them in their synagogues.
Nitzan: Lem’s wartime memories, however, did deeply influence his writing style. In the years to come, he became a writer - a codemaster. His sci-fi novels contained a myriad of hidden meanings, riddles and references to topics unrelated to the universe of stars, robots and space rockets. They were loaded with meticulously coded autobiographical references.
Agnieszka Gajewska: The combination of all those threads about alienation and fear, the different levels of fear, despondence, suicidal thoughts, hunger… They appear in all his novels and form a vivid picture of these experiences, which didn’t necessarily have to be all his own. It could’ve been a product of his imagination, an attempt to understand what happened to loved ones about whom he knew nothing more than that they had perished during the war.
Adam: But before Lem started writing about these experiences in his books, something else very important happened. After the war, Lem continued the med school training he had started in Lviv, but he never ended up taking the final exams.
Nitzan: Firstly, he’d always wanted to be an engineer or a scientist anyway. That was why, in his free time outside of medical classes, Lem wrote his first work. It was a disastrous, nonsensical and pseudo-scientific paper titled: A Theory of the Brain’s Workings.
Adam: He brought it to a scholar he’d randomly met, Dr Choynowski, who, in turn, gave it an absolutely scathing review... But seeing young Lem’s enthusiasm, he took him under his wing.
Wojciech Orliński: And when this teacher heard that his promising young student does not speak English how is that possible: “You don't speak English? You'll never understand science without English so please leave me now and go back when you are able to read books in English”.
Adam: That’s Wojciech Orliński speaking, author of a best-selling Lem biography.
Wojciech Orliński: So he went home and in about a week he indeed self-taught himself to read... I think one of those first books he read this way, using simply a dictionary was the human use of human beings by Norbert Weiner, one of the first books about the social aspect of cybernetics.
Wojciech Orliński: It's a story I find hard to believe but it's a story of a genius so you need to believe it. His mind was not normal like mine or yours, it was a super brain of a super genius.
Nitzan: WIth English under his student’s belt, Choynowski took Lem under his wing. He essentially showed him how science works.
Wojciech Orliński: That’s how he got his first job. He was simply reading books and writing short summaries for people who are too lazy or have no access to those books and he was a passionate reader until his very very last days.
Adam: And that’s how Lem became one of only a handful of people behind the Iron Curtain who not only had access to Western scientific literature and magazines but was also reading them avidly. This would play a huge role in the years to come. This was also the moment Lem decided to become a writer rather than a doctor or engineer or scientist. It wasn’t long before he’d written a couple of books, but they didn’t seem to get any traction and were stuck in skirmishes with the censors.
Nitzan: This is why at school in Poland we’re taught that Lem only chose to write Sci-Fi as a way of avoiding communist censorship. But it did always sound like an oversimplification.
Wojciech Orliński: You're absolutely correct. It oversimplifies Lem's life and his decisions and I think if we stick to this simple explanation we lose a lot of interesting things from our side so... we should not do so. But in the first place Lem's reasoning was quite similar to the one used by Phillip K. Dick. Dick always dreamt of writing contemporary fiction, he actually wrote three contemporary novels and they were all rejected by every single publisher, at least that's what his agent told him. That was a devastating moment for Phillip K. Dick's life when his agent sent him back those manuscripts he said that he tried everywhere and please do not write these kinds of books ever again but we will always be happy to publish your sci-fi, please send as much as you can.
Adam: When Lem did write his first sci-fi book, The Astronauts, it became an overnight sensation. It was a trail-blazing piece for Polish sci-fi, and was quickly translated into Russian and German, spreading Lem’s name to the vast populations of the USSR and GDR.
Agnieszka Gajewska: In letters to friends, written just after the publication of The Astronauts, he was expressing his terror, that he was so flooded with commissions for more sci-fi novels that he’d be completely unable to write them all. I think that the success of The Astronauts, sort of, made Lem a sci-fi author for life.
Nitzan: After a few teething pains, everything seemed to go Lem’s way. He’d finally found a platform for expressing those dilemmas he couldn’t have expressed anywhere else.
Agnieszka Gajewska: Is there a better genre for delving into the ethical side of the production of weapons of mass destruction? Or wondering about the possibilities of peaceful uses for the atomic bomb? Only science fiction! Also, these are the times of the Cold War and arms race which contributed to space exploration… Lem wrote all his best novels in the period between the launch of Sputnik and the Moon landing. And his popularity also stemmed from them being written at the right moment.
Adam: We also talked to a Belarussian Lem expert, Wiktor Jaźniewicz, (tiny snippet of his voice) who said that in the USSR there was huge demand for sci-f. It was backed by a wave of optimism, a deep faith that the future was bright. The communist system was soon to be fully formed, people were to live forever happily and focus on discovering space and contributing to the advancement of humanity.
Agnieszka Gajewska: In any case, all the soviet cosmonauts were reading his novels because they were trying to understand how it would feel to be alone in space. They had to rely on literature, because nobody had been in space before.
Adam: Wiktor Jaźniewicz heard similar rumours...
Wiktor Jaźniewicz: Yes, absolutely, and he was so popular among cosmonauts that I even heard in the 1980s and 1990s they were asking for his books Solaris and Eden to be sent into orbit. They used to praise him for acutely describing the feeling of being in space even though he obviously never went into space.
Nitzan: Lem’s literature was making some serious noise because it was different, outstanding, unheard of. It blended some unique ingredients - his coded wartime memories, his quirky sense of humour and his lovable childishness...
Agnieszka Gajewska: There is this element of childish fun in his novels. When he emigrated to Austria in the 1980s, he’d often go to the amusement parks in Vienna, he never ceased to enjoy them. He’d take his literary agents on rollercoasters and even though it made them sick he just couldn’t think of a better pastime.
Nitzan: But more than anything, his works are a reflection of his genius mind. A mind that could have made a great engineer and scientist.
Wojciech Orliński: I think it is important for a sci-fi writer to have this engineer mind, engineer way of thinking because (...) sometimes in those poorly written pulp sci-fi there's a gadget and it simply works... you just press the button and it simply works. It's never like this with actual technology. Technology often annoys you, often fails you. And, it takes this engineer-like imagination to imagine this futurist gadget which doesn't exist yet, but how can it fail you? What would be needed to repair it?
Adam: Keep in mind that Lem was a voracious reader of all the newest scientific releases and magazines
Wojciech Orliński: He put the science in his science fiction directly from science magazines... N ot even from some popular summaries but he took them directly from scientific publications. So for instance when neutrons became famous or neutrinos or mezons you could immediately find that there's a very important scientific discovery and there's Lem putting it into his next novel just the same month even.
Nitzan: But Lem took this game even further. Already on top of what was happening now, he was trying to imagine what might come next...
Wojciech Orliński: So Lem did anything he could to beg borrow or steal western press, western books and read them and because they came at such price, he read them very intensely, very thoroughly. So for instance he was definitely the first Polish Sci-fi writer and I think eastern sci-fi writer to start to write about devices which strongly resemble contemporary iphones and ipads and kindles. They appear in his book very early - 1954, 1961 you already have the entire concept of ebooks and something quite resembling the Internet. You also find in those early books way before the Internet was actually imagined by the actual engineers.
Adam: Sounds unbelievable, right? Well Mikołaj Gliński, Culture.pl’s own literature expert, once went through Lem’s entire output to look for examples of him foreseeing technology. The fascinating article he wrote about it can be found in the show notes. So of course we got Mikołaj to help us dissect how Lem’s crystal ball worked.
Mikołaj: This starts kind of early like already in The Magellanic Cloud which is like an early novel from 1955, he describes a Communistic utopian future. It's set in the 32nd century, so we get to read about some technological developments which happened during more than a millenium and some of them are quite interesting. Like, when he discusses a small device which he describes as a pocket receiver, and which allows you to access any piece of data from anywhere around the world and it's available on your screen within seconds.
Voice: We use it today without even thinking about the efficiency and might of this great, invisible net which enlaces the globe. Whether it be in one’s Australian studio, or in a lunar observatory, or on board an airplane – how many times has every one of us reached for our pocket receiver and called upon Trion Library central, naming the desired work which, within a second, appeared in front of us on the television screen?
Mikołaj: So basically what he's doing there he's talking about smartphones. But along the way he's talking about this digital library and this whole giant network, an invisible network that surrounds the globe and which has the globe to store loads of data and make them available to us digitally and instantaneously.
Nitzan: Well… that’s obviously the Internet. The earliest prototypes of the Internet can be traced back to the mid 1960s, while work on smartphones started in the 1990s, and here was Lem pretty precisely describing it all in 1955.
Adam: Mikołaj found very detailed, almost technical descriptions of 3D printers, ebooks (that one is eerily accurate), audiobooks and search engines. But what’s most astonishing is that Lem’s visions of the future go further than the commonplace today.
Mikołaj: One of the things I personally find most interesting about Lem’s predictions is how he could foresee the rise of the electronic literature (biterature), the possibility that the AI would one day be able not only to produce comprehensible elocutions in natural language, but also create what we call literature. This, I feel, is actually happening right now, in front of our eyes, so to speak. Lem wrote about this idea in the 1970’s in a story called “History of biterature”.
In that story or essay Lem was basically saying - of course in a humorous and quite ironic way - that there will come a day when computers will specialise in writing pieces of literature. What’s more, they will be able to emulate not only the style but the whole creative genius of a writer. So he was saying that it would be fully possible to have AI write new pieces by Shakespeare, Joyce or Dostoyevsky which is his example. Those pieces would be indistinguishable from the original work of that author - even for scholars and critics.
As far as I know, this is exactly happening right now. With the new technology like the GPT-3, the algorithm created by the Open AI, designed to produce text in natural language, it’s now getting extremely realistic that within months or years we will be able to actually really read ‘new’ and excellent pieces by Kafka, Shakespeare, and others - I guess Lem too.
Nitzan: With his clear, almost prophetic vision of the future, you'd think that Lem was a great enthusiast for the advancement of technology. But nothing more could be further from the truth.. Huge parts of Lem’s works are devoted to questions about the moral side of technological development, about the use and abuse that might stem from new inventions and discoveries.
Wojciech Orliński: Lem was deeply traumatised by what he saw and experienced and witnessed during WWII and you could understand how it changed his own approach to technology, his own dreams about being an engineer. If you are fascinated by science and technology sooner or later you will be fascinated by German scientists, German engineers, German inventors and to see those masterpieces of engineering employed in killing people on industrial level it will make you rethink your approach to technology.. to put it mildly. So he did a lot of rethinking. And this question of how do you manage to put the ethical and moral advancement of mankind. with the scientific and technological advancement is (cut) a permanent mark of Lem's fiction and non-fiction.
Adam: The perfect embodiment of these concerns is the main character from Lem’s ‘The Cyberiad’. Klapaucius is a robotic engineer who, after inventing something new, always asks himself: what evil might come from this?
Wojciech Orliński: Lem has this approach that the inventors and scientists ask themselves this question not often enough. Usually, they are too fixated on this tunnel vision of only asking the good question, like what benefits could we have from this or that invention which also makes Lem one of the first people who started to warn mankind about the evils that might come with the Internet. He did so in 1995 when nobody else did that in Poland I can say that for certain and almost nobody worldwide so he was the first cyber pessimist.
Nitzan: Lem warned people about cyber crimes and cyber wars. But he was also concerned about the surge of conspiracy theories and anonymous hate-filled messaging. He famously said: Before I started using the internet, I had no idea that the world was so full of idiots.
Adam: With his visionary works full of ironic humor, philosophical questions, coded personal memories and fascinating plots, Lem has become a household name when it comes to European Sci-Fi literature. Translated into numerous languages, his books also served as the basis for huge movie adaptations, such as Ari Folman’s The Congress starring Robin Wright, and Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris starring George Clooney. The most famous is Andrey Tarkovsky’s Solaris, a classic of Russian cinema also notable due to the huge dispute Lem had with the director - but that’s another story. You can find a link all about it in the show notes.
Nitzan: We’ll also have a link to a full list of Lem-inspired films, since they’re a good gateway to Lem’s literature. But now, since you already know so much about Lem thanks to this episode, the next obvious step is to get one of his books and embark on a journey! We asked each of our guests to recommend one of Lem’s novels as your starting point to Lem’s universe. Ladies first. Agnieszka Gajewska said:
Agnieszka Gajewska: If you’re looking for autobiographical threads and the finest blend of irony and passion for science - go for Tales of Pirx The Pilot.
Adam: Meanwhile Wiktor Jaźniewicz recommends you start with A Perfect Vacuum, a compendium of critical reviews of books that don’t actually exist...
Nitzan: ...And Wojciech Orliński couldn’t resist recommending three books:
Wojciech Orliński: I think you cannot make a really bad choice picking just the book which you find next to you. But first, take the book which is the best selling one. For some reason people mostly want to read about love, they prefer it from neutrinos from philosophical question I don’t know why but somehow that's how the audience works so take this greatest love story in science fiction - Solaris.
Nitzan: If you didn’t quite catch that, that was Solaris.
Wojciech Orliński: If you want to follow Lem's own advice, take the Cyberiad. He personally thought it was his best and actually his only good one that was the answer he gave in some interview that all that is rubbish but there’s a one he wants to keep for further generations and it’s Cyberiad.
Nitzan: Cyberiad, no. 2 and finally..
Wojciech Orliński: And if you are a hard sci-fi fan take the Master's Voice.
Nitzan: This episode of Stories From The Eastern West was brought to you by Culture.pl, the flagship brand of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. It was hosted by Adam Zulawski and me, Nitzan Reisner.
Adam: It was reported, written and scored by Wojciech Oleksiak. Wojciech would like to thank professor Agnieszka Gajewska, Wojciech Orliński, Mikołaj Gliński and Wiktor Jaźniewicz for taking the time to talk to him.
Nitzan: And if you want to learn anything else about Lem and his works, the show notes have lots of links for you and can be found in your podcast app or on the Stories From The Eastern West website at sftew.com
Adam: Next month we’re taking you across the border to the Czech Republic to follow the story of Vera Chytilova - the exceptional film director who fought an uphill battle against the communist regime and the man-dominated film industry of Czechoslovakia.
Nitzan: See you next month!
Adam: Bye!
END
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